The Weekly Screed (#665)

You gonna argue with
a guy named Hensleigh Wedgwood?
By David Benjamin

“… But at night, brother howlet, over the woods,
    Toll the world to thy chantry;
    Sing to the bats' sleek sisterhoods
    Full complines with gallantry:
    Then, owls and bats,
    Cowls and twats,
    Monks and nuns, in a cloister's moods,
    Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!…”
                             — Robert Browning (1841)

MADISON, Wis. — I know exactly where Bob Fitzsimmonds is coming from, and so does the immortal poet Robert Browning.

It all started when Bob — Treasurer of the Virginia Republican Party — logged onto Facebook to shmooze with a girl named Heather. Yes. Heather. To paraphrase DirecTV, “Don’t shmooze on Facebook with a girl named Heather.”

Or, for that matter, Amber.

There on Facebook, for all the social-media world to read, Bob expressed his disapproval of a fellow Republican, Fairfax County Delegate Barbara Comstock, in these terms: “I have nothing against Barbara Comstock, but I hate sexist twat.”

On the Web, in general, this scandalous phrase — which drew a chorus of demands for Bob to resign his GOP post — was rendered as “… I hate sexist (expletive for female genitalia).” However, one website, The Raw Story, boldly asterisked the term into “tw*t,” while another, Mason Conservative just plowed right ahead and printed “twat,” possibly deciding that after we’ve all seen a few dozen Pussy Riot newsclips on CNN and CBS News, what the hell?

The same spirit probably inspired Frankly Curious Dot Com to post a link to all 152 twattish synonyms, among which the most poetic are “bat cave,” “hooded lady,” “moose knuckle,” “whispering eye” and “wizard sleeve.”

Alas, poor Bob. If only he’d called Barb a “sexist moose knuckle.” The media universe would have responded more with head-scratching than outrage.

At first, I was a little put off by Bob’s remark, because I’m a little squeamish about gross references to ladies’ goodies. Among these, I’ve always regarded “twat” as just one degree more shocking than the C-word — both of which George Carlin, a gentleman after all, would have probably never uttered on television.

Bob’s vulgarity troubled me, but his grammar was puzzling. I couldn’t help but mentally insert an “a” in front of “sexist twat.” Why did Bob omit the article? Or, if Bob is lumping Barb into a category, shouldn’t he render “twats” as a plural.

The scales fell off this apparent blunder when Bob issued his obligatory mea culpa, adding: “I used the wrong word. I thought it meant the same as ‘twaddle’.”

Of course! As a collective noun — like “rubbish” or “nonsense” — “twaddle” requires no article. It tolerates usage both singular and plural.

With this admission (and the recovery of his grammatical integrity), I swung over to Bob’s side, Republican or not. I’ve made reams of similar errors myself. In a letter to a college president once, I mistook “mordant” for “trenchant.” In a book that stayed in print for almost 20 years, I wrote “stoat” where I meant “shoat,” and “Butterfly McQueen” where I intended “Hattie McDaniel.” The latter two screw-ups haunted me ‘til I was finally able to publish a revised version of the book.

Further mitigating Bob’s goof is that none other than Robert Browning pulled the same boner in his poem, Pippa Passes. He referenced the “cowls and twats” of “monks and nuns,” thinking that a twat was an item of nunnish headgear. His “naïve” mistake, according to researchers, dates to a 17th-century poem, Vanity of Vanities that conflates Carmelite coochie with a Vatican beanie, as follows:

They talk’d of his having a Cardinall’s Hat
They’d send him as soon an Old Nun’s Twat

Innocent though they both might be, however, both Bobs, in trotting out “twat,” screwed the pooch. As I searched the literature, I found little consolation for either Fitzsimmonds or Browning in the naughty word’s origins. Most lexicographers couldn’t trace “twat” at all. One who tried found its source in an Old Norse word, thveit, meaning a cut, a slit or a forest clearing — which pretty much circled me back to “Oh my God. Why did he say that?”

Momentarily, on a British website called Thinking Twat Shirts, I thought I’d found a defense Bob from his detractors. The site said, “‘Twat’ is in fact an old English word meaning ‘one who likes to share their thoughts’. In medieval villages to be regarded as a ‘twat’ was something positive. It was the twats who voiced their thoughts and were generous in allowing other people into their world of ideas and opinions. Twitter is of course a modern medium for twats…”

At “Twitter,” I realized that whoever wrote this was pulling my leg.

Finally, as I was about to forsake the task of saving Bob FitzSimmonds’ ravaged reputation, I found it — proof that Bob was right all along! — in the Dictionary of English Etymology, Volume 3 by Hensleigh Wedgewood.

Quoth Prof. Hensleigh: “… Twattle. Betwattled, perplexed, confused, stupefied. The radical element twat corresponds to G[erman] zotte, signifying a bush of hair, whence zotteln, to entangle; den verzottelten bart…”

There, y’see? Rather than demanding Bob’s ouster, the impetuous media owe him a debt of gratitude. He enriched our vocabulary, made us all think (if only for one guilty moment) about naked women, and, best of all, betwattled the know-it-alls of the punditocracy with a lexical/anatomical conundrum that left all of us — guys and gals alike — feeling a little… well, pussy-whipped.